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Symphony No 7 in A major, Op 92

Introduction

It is one of the few things almost everyone knows about classical music: Beethoven was deaf. The condition, which began to be crippling around the beginning of his thirties and forced him to give up his career as a concert soloist, was torture for him. Yet on top of that, Beethoven was also tormented by persistent ringing in the ears (tinnitus), headaches, abdominal disorders, severe constipation, rheumatic attacks and a whole host of more mysterious ailments—some, though by no means all of them, probably psychosomatic in origin. He was also prone to serious depression: not surprisingly, one might say, given all that pain—to which one might add the frustration of being unable to find the ideal life partner he so desperately desired. But it is equally clear that Beethoven had tremendous reserves of strength, physically and mentally, fighting off infections and rising above all manner of other tribulations. Sometimes it was the very act of creating that saved him from despair—as the composer himself acknowledged in his famous private confession, the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament. At other times it was the experience of physical and emotional recovery that gave new impetus to composition.

It was during just such a period of recovery that Beethoven wrote his Seventh Symphony. In 1811, the prominent Viennese physician Dr Giovanni Malfatti recommended that Beethoven spend the summer in the Bohemian spa-town of Teplitz, famous for its ‘cure’. This was one of the very few pieces of good medical advice Beethoven ever received. Whatever the value of the spa’s famous water treatment, Teplitz was also a place of relative sanctuary in politically turbulent times. During the Napoleonic wars, diplomats from all sides would meet there for discussions, regarding it as neutral territory. The visit obviously gave Beethoven a tremendous personal and artistic boost. When he returned to Vienna in the autumn he had plans for two new symphonies. He began writing the Seventh almost immediately, while making notes about ‘a second symphony in D minor’. The latter did not fully materialise until twelve years later, as the choral Ninth; but almost as soon as Beethoven had finished No 7, in May 1812, he started work on the Eighth—the most playful and perhaps the least troubled of all his symphonies.

It is always a good idea to be careful about making direct comparisons between Beethoven’s presumed emotional state at a particular time and the character of the music he produced then. When Beethoven wrote that despairing Heiligenstadt Testament in the summer of 1802 he was also working on his Second Symphony—a work not without its dark and abrasive moments but, most commentators would agree, ultimately positive and full of vitality. Still it is hard to avoid the feeling that Beethoven’s renewed dynamism after his stay in Teplitz expressed itself directly in his Seventh Symphony—the symphony whose finale Wagner famously described as ‘the apotheosis of the dance’. The sheer physical energy of the work, expressed in bracing muscular rhythms and brilliant orchestration, can in some performances border on the unnerving. Confronted with one of the symphony’s many obsessively repeating passages (possibly the long final crescendo in the first movement), Beethoven’s younger contemporary Carl Maria von Weber pronounced him ‘ripe for the madhouse’. There are also darker, destabilising elements, chiefly expressed in the symphony’s recurring tendency to lean towards the relatively remote keys of C and F major. Yet at the end of the Seventh Symphony the home key of A major re-emerges in full splendour, reinforced by two massive cadential passages, both marked fff, fortississimo—one of the earliest examples of such an extreme dynamic in music.

At first there seems to be little of the dance about the Seventh Symphony. Slow-moving woodwind phrases are brusquely punctuated by chords from the full orchestra, but faster string figures soon galvanise the music into physical action. Eventually this substantial introductory section settles on a single note—an E, repeated softly by alternating woodwind and strings. This quickly begins to pick up energy and develops into a sprightly dotted rhythm, with which the Vivace begins. The basic dotted rhythm—basically an emphatic long note followed by two short ones (DA da-da: in poetic metrical terms, a ‘dactyl’)—not only dominates this first movement but plays a crucial part in the other three. You can also hear it (in a slightly different form) in the main theme of the following Allegretto, after the initial minor key wind chord calls us to attention. In fact the basic DA da-da rhythm is present in almost every bar of this uniquely atmospheric variation-like movement. The Allegretto was such a success at its first performance that it had to be repeated. It left a huge imprint on the young Schubert, who echoed its measured but far from earthbound tread in a number of his later works.

After the Allegretto, the Presto bursts into life. This movement has all the sprinting energy of a typical Beethoven Scherzo. It is twice interrupted by a substantial slower Trio section (with another version of the DA da-da rhythmic pattern in its main theme), and yet its vitality seems irrepressible: at the end of the movement a third, more tentative attempt to establish the slower Trio theme (major, then minor) is magnificently dismissed by five crisp orchestral chords. The Scherzo, however, ends as it began, in the ‘wrong’ key: the destabilising F major. It is now the finale’s task to ram home the symphony’s tonic key, A major. It duly begins with a massive assertion of the note E, the dominant of A major, which continues pounding emphatically in the bass almost throughout the first phase of the main theme. The movement develops into a magnificent bacchanal, driving almost to frenzy at the symphony’s seminal DA da-da pattern. The coda veers dangerously towards F for one last time; but at last the bass F falls to a far more rational E, and a huge crescendo begins. The last thing we hear is the Seventh Symphony’s basic dactylic rhythm, twice, fused triumphantly with the home triad, A major.

Recordings

'Hyperion's set is that early evening Beethoven cycle caught in recordings of remarkable intimacy and focus … it is a set I would happily put int ...'So magnificently exhilharating an account' (BBC Music Magazine)» More

Sir John Eliot’s Gardiner’s reading of these familiar pieces highlights their revolutionary origin. Performing on period instruments, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique brings light, clarity and brisk energy, as well as a warm and genuine ...» More

Beethoven was rarely explicit about any meaning behind his works. However it is impossible to listen to his Symphony No 7 without being captivated by a sense of euphoria, tainted only by what is possibly the most profound slow movement he was to w ...» More

'One can only marvel at Leslie Howard's tireless advocacy of Liszt, and the way he constantly overcomes the multitude of technical obstacles in his pa ...'This early Beethoven collection finds Howard on top form. The notes which [he] writes to accompany each issue are erudite, witty, totally enthralling ...» More

Leslie Howard’s recordings of Liszt’s complete piano music, on 99 CDs, is one of the monumental achievements in the history of recorded music. Remarkable as much for its musicological research and scholarly rigour as for Howard’s Herculean piano p ...» More

Details

The seventh and eighth symphonies were composed in rapid succession, between October 1811 and October 1812, and the two seem to be if not siblings, then at least first cousins. One feature they share is the absence of a genuine slow movement. In the eighth symphony, the second movement is an Allegretto with a strong scherzo element. It is followed not by an actual scherzo, which in the context would have been superfluous, but by an elegant and old-fashioned minuet—the only such piece in Beethoven’s symphonies. In the Symphony No 7 the exchange of roles between the two middle movements is rather more involved. The second movement is again an Allegretto, but one that is unexpectedly written in the symphony’s home tonality—albeit in the minor, rather than the major. The scherzo, in its turn, appropriates the key we might well have expected for the slow movement of a work actually in A minor. The scherzo is, in fact, in F major—the only instance in Beethoven’s symphonies of a piece of its kind that is not in the work’s main key.

Perhaps it was the lack of a later slow movement that led Beethoven to begin the work with the longest of all his symphonic slow introductions. The introduction itself contains two fully developed ideas, the first of them punctuated by rising staccato scales whose pulsating rhythm is to provide the generating force for what is one of the most rhythmically motivated of all Beethoven’s works; and the second being a lyrical theme played by oboe, and later flute. The following Vivace, on the other hand, is dominated throughout by a single sharply defined rhythmic figure. Its climax is reached in the coda, where a winding chromatic phrase is repeated over and over again by the lower strings, while above it the remainder of the orchestra gradually accumulates a crescendo of shattering power.

The famous second movement is a piece with a curiously ‘closed’ feel. Not only does it begin and end with the same sustained woodwind chord gradually dying away, but the variations that form its core unfold by a process of superimposition, with the ‘fatalistic’ rhythm of the theme itself running inexorably through all the accumulated layers. Even the contrasting episode in the major is underpinned by the same rhythmic figure in the basses, and only a hushed fugato passage following the return to the minor creates the sense of a more open design.

The third movement is one of Beethoven’s expanded scherzo designs, with two appearances of the slower trio, and a coda in which the trio’s material makes a brief return before being cut off by an abrupt conclusion in the scherzo’s tempo. As for the finale, it is carried irresistibly forwards by its swirling phrases, whose cumulative energy is unsurpassed by any of Beethoven’s other symphonic finales. Its structure is based on a deliberate deception. The regular cut of the themes—complete with internal repeats—lends them an unmistakably rondo-like aspect; but the movement turns out to be a fully developed sonata form instead. Mozart had written similarly ambiguous finales on occasion—not least, in his G minor Symphony No 40—but Beethoven carries the procedure further, and incorporates rondo-like episodes into his development section, too.

Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 was completed in 1812 and dedicated to Landgrave Moritz von Fries. This fragment – all that he managed of his only attempt at a solo piano transcription of one of his own symphonies – was undertaken by early 1815, probably in response to Diabelli’s wish to publish such an arrangement, and was published in facsimile under the present title by Willy Hess in his supplement to the Breitkopf edition of Beethoven’s complete works. It is included here for several reasons: its intrinsic interest; because it is not otherwise recorded; as a testament to Beethoven’s approval of such arrangements in general; and because the juxtaposition of Beethoven’s fragment with Liszt’s first transcription of the same material also convinces the listener of Liszt’s particular genius in the field as well as his superior fidelity to Beethoven in the text itself. Beethoven’s fascinating attempt breaks off towards the end of the Poco sostenuto. (Diabelli took over the task himself and made the first published solo piano transcription of the whole symphony, which was published in England in 1816 – as Beethoven’s Opus 98! Czerny also made an approved piano transcription, but in a version for four hands.)